LING001
Historical linguistics
4-8-2009
Change in Time
• The rate of change varies, but they build up until the "mother
tongue" becomes arbitrarily distant and different (cf. difficulty
in understanding some Brits or even Appalachians)
• After a thousand years, the original and new languages will
not be mutually intelligible (cf. English and German and
Dutch, and even more distantly English and Pashto (language
of Afghanistan))
• After ten thousand years, the relationship will be essentially
indistinguishable from chance relationships between
historically unrelated languages.
• Some changes take place in one generation (recall the cotcaught merger last time), some take over hundreds of years
(word order change in Classic Chinese)
Historical Reconstruction
• When considering whether languages are
related, we look for systematic
correspondences between vocabulary items in
different languages
• Since the relationship between sound and
meaning is arbitrary (dog-chein-gou), these
differences aren’t expected accidentally
A Note of Caution
• Chance resemblance is possible, just not
common
• English bad, Persian bad “bad”
• Dutch elkaar “each other”, Basque elkar “each
other”
• Examination of the rest of the vocabulary of
these languages reveal that these are accidental
Another Note of Caution
• Borrowing
• We need to consider if the word is a new addition to
the language or if it is vocabulary that is native to the
language
• e.g. we don’t want to conclude that English and
Mandarin are related based on:
– English: /kɑfi/ “coffee, Mandarin: /kɑfe/ “coffee”
– Btw, the English term came from Arabic, by way of
Turkish and then Dutch
Classifying Languages
• These systematic correspondences (we’ll look at
them more in a moment) are used to classify
languages according to their origins.
• Languages are put into families (and subfamilies)
• the relationships between languages are described
using female terms: most often daughter (and
mother)
Indo-European (IE)
• An early sketch from the late 1800s, more or
less accurate even today
Italic
• The Romance languages descended from Latin
are the only Italic languages spoken today
•
•
•
•
Ibero-Romance: Portuguese, Spanish
Gallo-Romance: French, Catalan, Romansch
Italo-Romance: Italian, Sardinian
Balkano-Romance: Romanian
Germanic
• English is part of the Germanic family.
Clear Cognates
English
Dutch
Danish
one
two
three
four
five
six
seven
eight
nine
ten
een
twee
drie
vier
vijf
zes
zeven
acht
negen
tien
en
to
tre
fire
fem
seks
syv
otte
ni
ti
Classifying Languages: Indo-European
• We also notice that there are similarities
between Latin (Romance), English /
German (Germanic) and yet other
languages: Greek and Sanskrit, for
example.
• Sir William Jones, in the 1780s, was the
first to notice them.
More Distant Relatives
English
Lithuanian
one
two
three
four
five
six
seven
eight
nine
ten
vienas
du
trys
keturi
penki
sheshi
septyni
ashtuoni
devyni
deshimt
Greek
heis
duo
treis
tettares
pente
heks
hepta
oktô
ennea
deka
Classifying Languages: Indo-European
Language Classification: How?
We rely on two things:
• the Uniformitarian Principle
• The regularity of sound-change
The Uniformitarian Principle
‘knowledge of processes that operated in the past
can be inferred by observing ongoing
processes in the present’
or, for language:
‘Language must work now in the same way as it
ever did’
Regularity of Sound-Change
• Most of historical linguistics relies on the
assumption that
• sound-change is regular and exceptionless
• That is, any sound-change will affect all the
words that contain that (combination of)
sound(s).
“regular and exceptionless’
• Consider:
• OE cnafa /knava/ > ModE knave /nejv/
• OE cniht /knixt/ > ModE knight /najt/
• So what’s the rule?
• And what’s the ModE reflex of OE cyning
/kyniŋ/?
“regular and exceptionless’
• OE /kyniŋ/ > ModE /kɪŋ/
• Why not /nɪŋ/?
• Because the rule that deletes initial /k/ only
applies before /n/.
• So, the rule getting rid of initial /k/ is
exceptionless, but it has a specific
environment when it applies, just like
phonological rules
The Comparative Method
• If we assume that sound-change is regular
and exceptionless in this way, we can use
systematic comparison of languages to see the
relationships between them.
This is known as the Comparative Method.
Grimm’s Law
• Important result of the comparative method
• Grimm’s Law: consonant changes between
Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic
Grimm’s Law
• ptk>fθx
• became fricatives in Germanic, but stayed same in
Latin & Greek
• bdg>ptk
• devoiced in Germanic, but stayed same in Latin &
Greek
• bh dh gh > b d g
• deaspirated in Germanic, but fricatives in Latin (f,
f, h), devoiced in Greek (ph, th, kh), retained in
Sanskrit, Hindi
p>f
Sanskrit
Greek
Latin
Gothic
English
PIE
pita
pate:r
pate:r
fadar
father
*pǝter-
padam
poda
pedem
fotu
foot
*ped-
(majority rule here in the inference about PIE)
Completed Chain Shift
• e.g. The Great Vowel Shift
Chain Shift in Progress
• e.g. The Northern City Shift (around the Great Lakes,
esp Syracuse, Rochester, Detroit, Chicago)
• ӕ > ej (ɪj), ɑ > a (ӕ), ᴐ > ɑ, ɛ > ʌ, backing of ʌ
ɪ
↘
ɛ →
a
Northern Cities Shift
•
•
•
•
•
ӕ > ej:
ɑ > a:
ᴐ > ɑ:
ɛ > ʌ:
ʌ > ᴐ:
laughs at it
on
all
seventeen
fund
Phonological and Morphological
Change
• Old English had rich case inflection
• Modern English has almost none
• Phonological change led to morphological
change
Case
•
•
•
•
Nominative = subject marker
Accusative = object marker
Dative = indirect object marker
Genitive = possessive marker
Se cniht
geaf gief-e þӕs hierd-es
sun-e
the youth.NOM gave gift-ACC the shepherd-GEN son-DAT
“The youth gave the shepherd’s son a gift.”
Old English Case
Sound Changes
• Dative: consonant deletion results in loss of
plural –m
• All cases: unstressed vowels reduced to schwa
• All cases: schwa deleted
• So, what’s left?
Modern English
NOM
ACC
GEN
DAT
SG
hound
hound
hound’s
hound
PL
hounds
hounds
hounds’
hounds
Morphological Change
• Reanalysis (folk etymology) – speakers
provide a morphological analysis that doesn’t
correspond (historically) to the derivation of
the word
• e.g. hamburger
Morphological Change
• Reanalysis
• e.g. earwig
• Old English: ēarwicga ear+insect
– would have been earwidge in Modern English
• “widge” is lost as an independent word
• Middle English: arwygyll ear+wiggle
• Modern English: earwig
Morpho-Syntactic Change
• e.g. Latin had no pronounced determiners
• the distinction between a and the (new vs old
information) was marked through word order
– latrâvit canis “a dog barked”
– canis latrâvit “the dog barked”
Morphological Change
• Over-regularization – irregular morphology becomes
regular
• e.g. Old English Comparatives
– Adjective + ra, with stem change (similar to certain
irregular past tense, e.g., say-said)
• long ~ lengra
– Adjectives + ra, no stem change
• wearm ~ wearmra
• Expected in Modern English:
• warm ~ warmer, long ~ lenger!
• Instead, overregularization yielded longer
Semantic Change
• Other examples of semantic change
– Broadening: dogge used to be a specific breed
– Narrowing:
• meat used to be “food” (flesh was “meat”)
• deer originally meant “animal” (cf the related
German word Tier “animal”), but became
restricted
– Shifting: nice used to mean “ignorant”
Syntactic Change
• Modern English:
– auxiliary verb raises to Tense
– main verb stays in VP
– result: main verb follows adverbs: John often went
skiing.
• French:
– auxiliary verb raises to Tense
– main verb raises to Tense
– result: verb (aux or main) precedes adverbs: John went
often skiing
Syntactic Change
• Old and Middle English:
Here men vndurstonden ofte by this nyght the night of synne
here men understood often by this night the night of sin
Syntactic Change
• Modern English
– I to C in questions
– result: aux verb to C in questions
• French
– I to C in questions
– result: verb (aux or main) to C in questions
Rise of ModE Patterns
Why do Languages Change?
• Natural processes in language use
– rapid or casual speech produces assimilation,
vowel reduction, deletion
– this pronunciation can become conventionalized,
and so end up being produced even in slower,
more careful speech
Child Language
• What’s natural for kids was natural for our
ancestors as well.
• “scant” was “skamt”: m became n in the
neighborhood of t (assimilation: K.I.S.S.)
history
bug-gug: child
Why do Languages Change?
• Language Learning
• The child must construct their language based
on the input received
• This process is imperfect
• Bias towards regularization – learning an
irregular form requires more input
• Also random differences may spread,
especially through a small population
Why do Languages Change?
• Language Contact
• Through migration, conquest, trade
• Adults may learn the new language as a
second language
• Children may be fully bilingual
• Results in borrowing of words, sounds, even
syntactic constructions
Borrowing
• Borrowed words with sounds not in the
borrowing language may be “nativized”
– e.g. Russian does not have [h]
– German words with [h] borrowed into Russian
change to [g]
– German Hospital -> Russian gospital
Borrowing
• Or, the borrowed sounds may be incorporated
into the new language (Bach [x])
• If the borrowing is extensive enough, a new
phoneme may be added to the borrowing
language
Language change: good or bad?
• Not an aesthetic question!
• All stages of language are valid expressions of
our language instinct (Universal Grammar)
• Just as all languages and dialects are valid
expressions of our language instinct